Traditionally, telecommunication service providers and other corporate entities have maintained account information for their subscribers or other customers on an internal enterprise network typically configured to include a mainframe or other large scale computing device in which the account information was maintained and plural client computing devices capable of accessing information maintained on the mainframe. In contrast with a traditionally configured limited access enterprise network such as the one herein described, the Internet is a vast, publicly accessible computer network comprised of a wide variety of disparate computing devices operated by an equally disparate group of computer users. These computing devices are interconnected by various connection media which communicate using the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (“TCP/IP”) set of communication protocols.
In recent years, it has become increasingly commonplace for commercial enterprises such as corporations to interconnect their limited access enterprise network with the Internet. The purpose of such interconnections was two-fold—to enable the users of the enterprise network access to resources available through the Internet and to enable external computer users to access selected resources of the enterprise network through the Internet through a computer system commonly referred to as a web server. As the corporate web server became more common, information which was traditionally maintained on the mainframe where it could only be accessed by employees through the enterprise network began to migrate onto the web server. As a result, while a web server typically maintains publicly available content, oftentimes, it will also maintain content for which access is limited to authorized users. For example, a telecommunications service provider may have a web site which provides general information on its services within a publicly accessible portion of the site while allowing existing account holders to access confidential information, typically, their personal account information, within a limited access portion of the site to which unrelated third parties are barred.
Early web sites were quite rudimentary, with only a limited amount of functionality available to the accessing subscriber. As the web sites became more sophisticated, however, additional subscriber functionality was added to the sites. Similarly, as subscribers became more “web-savvy”, their expectations of what subscriber functionality should be available at the sites grew. Over time, it became common for a web site to allow a subscriber to review invoices, update subscriber information and make payments on-line. However, certain limitations have prevented web sites from performing these and other tasks effectively. For example, to place invoices on-line, it was common for the service provider to employ software which electronically searches through text images of the printed invoices for information of interest, captures selected information from the text images of the printed invoices and reformat the captured information to create electronic invoices. This technique is both complex and difficult to maintain. For example, if the name of a product or service is changed, the software employed by the service provider must be updated in order to be able to continue to capture invoice information associated with the re-named product or service.
It also became desirable for the service provider to place account receivable (“A/R”) information on the web site. Unlike invoice information which, once generated, remains unchanged, A/R information is constantly updated. For example, a subscriber may be billed on the first of the month, receive a partial credit for a wrong number on the tenth of the month and pay the balance owed on their account on the twentieth of the month. Thus, any A/R information to be maintained on the web site must be constantly updated by the mainframe in order to be accurate. Otherwise, the subscriber accessing A/R information through the web site would view outdated information. However, a significant amount of resources may be consumed by the heavy traffic resulting from the constant updating or “synchronizing” necessary such that the A/R information residing on the web server matches that residing on the mainframe.
Another problem with maintaining invoice, A/R and similar types of subscriber information on the web site relates to the substantial consumption of memory resources at the web site which results from maintaining these types of subscriber information at the web site. For example, a service provider typically generates a new invoice for each customer on a monthly basis. It should be readily appreciated, therefore, that maintaining invoice information on-line will quickly consume the available memory resources, particularly if the service provider has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. To conserve existing memory resources and avoid the added expense of additional memory resources, many web sites which maintain invoice information on-line will typically limit the number of months of invoice information available over the web. For example, many sites limit available invoice information to only two months and will delete aged invoice information to free space for newer invoice information. While such an approach both keeps the information which tends to be of most interest to subscribers while restraining the cost of maintaining invoice information on-line, it does limit the usefulness of the web site since subscribers interested in older invoices are forced to contact a representative of the service provider capable of retrieving the desired invoice information off the mainframe computer system.
By configuring a computer network such that A/R information residing on the web server can remain synchronized with A/R information residing on the mainframe without generating an excessive amount of traffic therebetween, a current obstacle to the migration of A/R information to the web server could be lessened or eliminated. It is, therefore, the object of the invention to provide a computer network capable of synchronizing information in such a manner.